It’s a new year and Illumen has a new hairdo — or “website” might be a better word. Our new site (www.illumengroup.com) has plenty of new case studies, images, project descriptions, and information about eLearning, interactive widgets, and 3D/motion graphics. Both this and our mobile site continue to have added case studies, videos, and eLearning/eMarketing information so check back often. Enjoy!
Lectora is an eLearning authoring tool that produces courses in web, SCORM, and AICC formats. Lectora, like its Articulate and Captivate counterparts, does a great job giving you a blank canvas to populate with your content. While there is a slight learning curve to development, anyone who is familiar with PowerPoint would feel comfortable creating pages (or Titles as they are called in Lectora), and publishing to SCORM, or AICC compliant formats.
Lectora Creates Websites
eLearning does not require SCORM/AICC compliancy to work with an LMS or help educate. Sometimes you need to present your content as a simple website. Lectora is different than Articulate and Captivate in that it creates what most people would consider a standard website, in that it is HTML based, rather than Flash based. In fact, you can use Lectora as a website creator to create a website with a menu, pages, and even some form capabilities. When you publish a Lectora file in a simple web format, it creates all the HTML, CSS, and Javascript - all the goodies that make a website work under the hood. While this can be helpful bringing your course to your website, be aware that editing the code itself is not as easy.
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Have a wonderful non-working, food eating, and adventurous holiday and new year!
Testing = Learning
In what seems likely to be an “ah ha” moment for education development, researchers at Purdue University’s Department of Psychological Sciences, explored the possibility that testing isn’t just an assessment of learning, but is a component that facilitates learning just like studying - but better.*
“Practicing retrieval (testing) produces greater gains in meaningful learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping.”
In an article published last month in Science magazine, a total of 200 students studied texts on topics from different science disciplines. One group engaged in elaborative studying by creating concept maps - diagrams that illustrate the complicated connections and relationships in the material. The second group read the texts and then practiced retrieval (unassisted recall of material). The students returned to the lab a week later for the actual assessment of long-term learning. The group that studied by practicing retrieval showed a 50% improvement in long-term retention scores above and beyond the group that studied by creating concept maps.
“Retrieval practice enhances learning by retrieval-specific mechanisms rather than by elaborative study processes.”
Whenever we find ourselves headed to a live event, we are subconsciously prepared to see teachers, training facilitators, and/or presenters expressing information. When we go online to learn, we are subconsciously prepared for far less human interaction; usually none at all. The evolution of eLearning is only now providing easier ways of bringing what we expect at live events, online. This evolution brings an enrichment of video, motion, imagery, and engaging content delivery tools, making the human touch no longer a thing out on the horizon. Providing the human touch to our projects can be easy (and fairly inexpensive) to implement. The human touch provides:
When your project requires a touch screen, getting what you need is kind of a big deal. To do this you need to understand your application, the environment the screen will be placed into, and the audience. With the the apple iOS for iphones and iPads, Android from Google, and Microsoft’s new Windows 7 Phone based devices, the media is all a stir about multi-touch based screens. Multi-touch is the ability to touch the screen in more than one place and have both points recognized as an interaction at the same time. This sure does come in handy if you are going to resize a photo by putting two fingers on screen and bringing them towards or away from each other, but, to be honest, not always needed for most kiosk based applications. As prices for all devices are dropping, you still shouldn’t pay for something you don’t need. If your application requires a simple touch of a button or sliding of a scroll bar, single-touch might be right up your alley.
Is your device going to be used in an industry, such as medical, that might require latex gloves to be worn? Perhaps cleaning fluids like water and soap are going to be making an appearance on the hand? You might need to check out a resistive touchscreen over a capacitive touchscreen. Capacitive touchscreens are seen with your iPhone or iPad. Notice that you can’t touch the device with any object and hope for recognition. Resistive touchscreens recognize a press between two plates and therefor recognize any object that can put force on the screen. This is ideal for glove wearers or if you need to cover the device with a clear material to protect it from the elements. There are many other types of screens as well and there is a lot of great information online about them.
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Fifty to 60% of the project inquiries we’ve received over the past year have included questions about Games-That-Teach. There exists both a curiosity about what’s possible and angst over their perceived complexity and application.
What are Games-That-Teach? Part of what creates angst is the broad definition of what a GTT is. Also known as Game-Based Learning, the simple definition, “a learning-based activity that challenges a participant to a contest or task with an outcome that is both measurable and comparable,” is broad enough to encompass many content delivery formats. These games are often used to help audiences better understand information, improve performance, manage situations, think critically, problem solve and make decisions.
GTTs generally fall into one of three categories – Edutainment, Training Simulators, and Serious Games. They may be as sophisticated as a virtual reality environment like World of Warcraft (over 11.5 million unique players worldwide) and the popular FarmVille (over 82.4 million unique players worldwide), or as basic as Tic-Tac-Toe or Scrabble. It is the element of challenge that differentiates games from other content delivery tools.
Do Games Work? Here’s where you can relax a bit. Despite being around since 1962, there’s little empirical evidence that digital games as a whole are better at teaching than other, more conventional content delivery formats. Again, the variety and complexity of game types combined with the huge differences in the goals and objectives they seek to achieve and a limited ability to collect meaningful performance metrics conspires to keep the value of game’s contributions to learning enveloped in a haze. We think we see a form but the edges are fuzzy. The reason we think games are effective in the learning environment is that they clearly support three dominant learning theories:
The quick answer to the question “Do Games Work?” is, on an epistemic level (games that help players learn to solve problems that don’t have standardized answers) an emphatic… probably, but on a training level the answer is, almost certainly. In fact, Europe is well ahead of North America in the productive use of digital game-based learning in the corporate training environment.
Our most successful game-based learning programs have been those that incorporate game components as part of the pedagogy, using them to reinforce concepts and create deeper learning.
Creating the Right Game for The Situation – now is an appropriate time to get into the game pool by starting at the shallow end. Here are 10 heuristics that will help keep you afloat while you learn to swim: Read more >>
1. Be Your Student
Try viewing your course as your student would. Look at the user interface (design and navigation). Do you know what section you are in? Do you know how many sections there are? Do you know how to review previous content? Here is a big one — Does your student know their goals and objectives for the course or the section they are in? Do they know why they are even there? Look at the content. Is it too high level? Where are the basics? What questions does the content raise? Let the questions flow and try and answer them all.
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When dealing with training, education, and marketing solutions, it doesn’t take long before we start hearing words we may not know. Below is a list of 20 common terms and definitions.
More people are using mobile devices to handle their everyday computer tasks. Given three minutes and my iPhone, I can check my work and personal emails, my schedule, the news, the weather, and sometimes even get in a game of Tetris. It, like so many mobile devices, is usable, engaging, efficient, informative, and scalable. This mobile convenience should carry through training and marketing solutions as well. Unfortunately, often due to certain limitations of each mobile device and their short shelf life, there is often not a credible mobile counterpart to most training applications. To bridge the gaps, here are 6 ways to extend the user experience of your web or CD-ROM based app through mobile devices.